Various personal monitors have been proposed to assist in the care of elderly, infirm or vulnerable people, or the supervision of other individuals. These personal monitors include devices with equipment such as accelerometers designed to detect when someone falls, panic buttons which can be pressed when an individual gets into trouble, and tracking devices that can be used to detect when an individual wanders outside of a specific area. These tracking devices may be intended to allow those with memory loss, frailty, or symptoms of dementia to live more independent lives in their own homes rather than in care-homes.
All of these personal monitors must be carried by the person being monitored (the user) in order to be effective. The requirement to wear a device is inconvenient for the person being monitored, and introduces a source of error if the user does not carry or wear the device, either through forgetfulness, discomfort, inconvenience or a deliberate attempt to avoid being monitored.
Whilst detecting or generating alerts for singular events such as falls or other emergencies is highlighted as a priority, there is also a need for an activity monitor that can measure other activities or behaviours, and also to derive trends from these monitored activities.
To illustrate this we consider the example area of caring for elderly or infirm people. A major problem affecting the quality of life of elderly or infirm people is loneliness. Any attempts to address loneliness amongst the elderly have been centred on services such as care-worker visit time and telephone contact lines. However these approaches do not address the root causes of loneliness. The former can be overly targeted on the elderly person's physical needs and may be perfunctory in nature given the limited time that is allotted to each visit. The latter requires the elderly person to realise that they are lonely and feeling down and then act to remedy it.
In all cases there is no attempt to measure loneliness. There is a correlation between the amount of interpersonal contact one has and how lonely one feels. Although different people need different amounts of contact to feel connected, being able to relate an amount of interpersonal contact to their level of well-being would give a potential trigger for intervention such as extended care-worker visits. Someone whose neighbours visit twice daily would be expected to have a different degree of loneliness from someone who only has two twenty minute care worker visits or no visitors at all.
Again considering the example of elderly or infirm people, there are also scenarios where a person can get into difficulties and a fall detector or panic alarm does not detect that an emergency has occurred, either because the device is not being worn or the nature of the event cannot be detected by the device. A monitor system that detects other types of activities could be used to intelligently infer that the person is in an emergency situation.
Accordingly, there is a need for an activity monitor that can detect activities or behaviours of a monitored person or animal. It would also be desirable for an activity monitor to identify trends from identified activities. It would also be desirable to implement an activity monitor without requiring a wearable device.